I love YA novels. There. I'm not ashamed to admit it (anymore). We live some of the best, or at any rate, the most vividly remembered and transitory times during our youth. Because that is when anything is possible, you know? You're young, you know things, you're wary but not as much when you become slightly older and you know that life disappoints and people go away. And in YA lit, you go through your youth and come to the same realization but in a way that would make you think that there's hope, that you can pick yourself up and dust off the bad things and start-over. That's one of the reasons I love these books. That shining ray of light at the end of the tunnel. I also think that that's one phase that everything you go through seems much more magnified, more real. Maybe we learn to dumb down our reactions to things as time passes by, or maybe we become indifferent, but that keen awareness is lost. --spoilers aheadSo I spent the last 24 hours absorbed in a YA dystopian series, Divergent. I don't really know why I started reading this one. I had a vague idea idea it existed, no clue about the plot and I just got the books and began reading them yesterday. Maybe it had something to do with my impending exams, but nah. Anyway, so Divergent (which is the name of the series and also of the first book), starts off in a great way. It builds the characters, and the settings really well, and as is common for a dystopian novel - there is suspense, and it's well done. I haven't read the Hunger Games, but I've heard that this is a direct inspiration from that series. It's set in a distant future in Chicago, where society as a whole functions with all the members divided into factions based on their behaviour - Abnegation, Candor, Erudite and Dauntless. Each member is initiated into a faction based on an aptitude when they turn 16. The main protagonist of this series, Tris Prior, receives a mixed result (Divergent), and there starts her journey. The series deals with the journey of the Divergents and the back story of how the factions came to be. What drew to me the book however was the romance between Tris and one of her leaders at Dauntless, (the faction she chooses to go to) Four. (Yeah, I just admitted that I like love stories.) There is enough going in the books that it is not only about Tris and Four, but there is enough going on that it is importantly about them too. That's the right kind of balance for me, and importantly Tris and Four, they just work. Maybe I'm just at a phase where I need something to work, to escape to, to believe in, but I really liked them. (If you didn't get that from my long ramble already). So, evidently, when Tris DIES, at the end of the third book, I'm just taken aback, slightly in shock, and at a loss to know what to think. I don't know how I became so emotionally invested in this character but I evidently did and it'll take me some time to recover from this. Which leads me to think how much harder it is to recover from the death of a person you knew in real life, and... I'd just rather not stroll down that road now.